Ken Burns: American Icon with Surprising Passions

As we glow in the lights and joy of another Holiday season, my final 'Lunch at Michael's' column of 2003 with film-maker Ken Burns reflects on how, as Ken says, "we cohere as a people." For all our differences, we are one and no one has found as compelling a way to communicate our present and our future through the past as Ken Burns. I'm pleased and honored to share my lunch at Michael's with American icon Ken Burns as my way of celebrating the true spirit of the holidays with you.

In August of 2002, documentary film-maker Ken Burns agreed to the first blind date of his life. After dinner at Gramercy Tavern, he walked his date home, stopping first at the office of the charity she founded, Room to Grow. There he saw baby clothes, books, and layettes "all new or nearly new and stacked floor to ceiling." Ken was moved by the work being done by the woman he affectionately refers to as "Midtown Julie Brown," now Mrs. Julie Burns. "She was doing God's work," Ken says. From the last trimester of pregnancy until children are eligible for Head Start, pre-school and other institutional programs at age three, Room to Grow provides extensive support for mothers who live in poverty, transforming the lives of their children. "The first three years are the most formative ones and they are the years when mothers and children have the least support," Ken commented at our lunch at Michael's last week.

Julie's work hit a responsive chord with Ken, whose mother died after a long battle with cancer when he was only eleven. "She was sick every moment I remember. It gives you vigilance but it was hell." Her sickness and the toll it took on Ken, his brother Ric (also a documentary filmmaker) and his father were the most formative influences on Ken's life. Years later, a psychologist pointed out to Ken that his passion for historical documentaries in some ways reflected the emotions of "a little boy trying to keep his mother alive. You wake the dead for a living," she pointed out to Ken. Although Ken refers to his films as "emotional archeology straining to hear the ghosts and echoes of the past," he perceives them as aspirational. "History," he says, "is more than sentimentality and nostalgia. History is about what and who we are now and the higher emotional intelligence we wish for ourselves."

Ken, now 50 and acknowledged as America's greatest historical documentary filmmaker, lives very much in the present and remains surprisingly unspoiled by his success. For the past twenty years, Ken has kept a New Yorker cartoon taped to his refrigerator. Two men, he related to me, are standing in the flames of Hell and one says to the other: "Apparently my over two hundred screen credits didn't mean a damn thing." He spends most of his time in Walpole, New Hampshire, a "Currier & Ives town where all my notoriety and fifty cents get me a cup of coffee" and not even a reserved table at the restaurant he opened there in 2001 with his friend Larry Burdick. (To taste one of the world's great chocolates, visit www.burdickchocolate.com.) In Walpole, he muses, "maybe my great great grandchildren can serve on the volunteer Fire Department."

Although Ken is a Brooklynite by birth, he lived in Delaware until he was nine and then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father taught anthropology. He was expected to attend the University of Michigan, where his tuition would have been fully paid, but instead he set out to the two-year old Hampshire College, which he had read about in Newsweek. It was, at the time, the most expensive college in the United States with tuition of $4,730, which Ken recalls because "it was $30 more than Harvard."

He was attracted by the promise of a free-form, independent, self-administered study program where students could design their own curriculum. "I took to it like a fish in water," he recalls, "but I also needed to work and scramble to pay for it." He was forced to take his second year off in order to work full-time, staying in New Hampshire, and returning in the third year with enough money to complete the program. "I knew what I wanted to do when I graduated and had the naive and arrogant desire to start my own company. I had wanted to be John Ford or Hitchcock, but I was animated by the past and I met a group of friends who wanted to make documentaries. I believed it meant taking a vow of poverty and anonymity." In 1975 Ken and his friends Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires were surviving on day jobs from BBC and others by promising to film anywhere in New England at minimal costs. "We would wake up at 4 AM, drive to Boston and shoot for a day, earning enough money to pay rent. Ken had a tape recorder and Buddy had a camera. I had ambition."

But in 1977, Ken had pneumonia, preventing him from working for awhile. A friend gave him David McCullough's book "The Great Bridge," about the Brooklyn Bridge and the historical response to it as an icon. He decided to make a documentary about the Bridge and although his friends thought he was hallucinating from high fever, Ken became single minded about the project. He raised $2,500 from Brooklyn's A&S Department Store to move to New York and start the project. When he completed taping in 1979, completely out of money, his choices were finding a job in New York or "going to the mattresses," he said with a laughing reference to Godfather movies. "If I stayed in New York I knew I would put the tapes on top of the refrigerator and leave them there. My friends were in Western Massachusetts so I moved to Walpole into the same house I live in today, where I could afford to live and edit the film."

It was three years later when Ken had a "stunning February experience in Walpole," that he related to me as we enjoyed our salads at Michael's while acknowledging friends and Ken's admirers. It was a busy day at Michael's, with tables occupied by Newsweek's Dorothy Kalins, wife of Ken's early (and still) partner Roger Sherman, Esquire's Kevin O'Malley, David Patrick Columbia, Cahner's Tad Smith, Marvel's Bob Friedman and Michael Parker, New York Magazine's Michael Wolff, Candy Pratts Price, Michael Korda with James Atlas, Ed Rollins, Disney's Tom Schumacher, Hearst's Michael Clinton, Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton, and Broadway producer Margot Harley. Publishing veteran Joe Armstrong stopped by and reminded Ken of their dinner years ago with Jackie Onassis, a dinner that proved to be her last dinner with friends before her death. Ken fondly recalls the former first lady asking him detailed questions about his passion for baseball. When he asked how she knew so much about the sport she replied, "Oh, I know nothing about it. Jack enjoyed football more but he did like baseball." Ken and I spoke about Mrs. Kennedy reverently, mentioning the lasting heritage she gave New Yorkers by saving Grand Central Terminal from certain destruction in the 1960s and 1970s. Ken remembered how impressed he was coming to New York for the first time as a fourth grader from Delaware, getting off the train at Grand Central. "Without this remarkable woman, Grand Central would have gone the way of the original Penn Station, one of the most extraordinary and spectacularly beautiful civic buildings we have ever seen in our lives, with arching steel beams and open latticework." His conversation and memories constantly connect with historical relevance.

As impressive as dinner with Jackie Kennedy Onassis and lunch at Michael's may be for Ken, he constantly uses that stunning day in 1982 to maintain perspective. At his home in Walpole in 1982, Ken typically received one to two calls a day, but on this cold February day, there were 18 calls on his answering machine. The first two were hang ups, but the third message congratulated Ken for his Academy Award nomination for his first film, "Brooklyn Bridge." Since he still could not afford to entirely heat his house with oil, after returning calls Ken collected wood for his fireplace and was heading back to the house with wood stacked in his arms when he slipped on a patch of ice and fell hard to the ground. He was lying there with "wood scattered around him, drenched in icy wet snow and realizing no one else nominated that day had been brought up so short and with such indignity. It was a gift from God that I always remember." (Ken went to Los Angeles for the award ceremony, but was defeated by "Genocide," a Holocaust documentary narrated by Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor. Ken was again nominated in 1985 for "The Statue of Liberty," but the award went to "Broken Rainbow.")

Greek tragedy and hubris are a constant theme in documentaries, Ken points out. "In the past fifty years, tragic events have united us, arrested our narrow parochial interests and helped us realize we're not alone in this world. I try to remind people what we share in common." Ken's PBS trilogy of "Civil War," "Baseball" and "Jazz" reflect, Ken observes, "on why we agree to cohere as a people. In the media culture today we are dialectically preoccupied with good and bad, in or out, black or white. My job is to show what we have in common, not what drives us apart."

In 1987, Ken brought this philosophy to General Motors, seeking underwriting for his "Civil War" documentary mini-series. He met with GM ad executives Jack McNulty and George Pruitt, who asked Ken to condense his "doorstopper" proposal into a brief description of the project. Ken proudly pulled out the short-version, a 25-page proposal that had gained him the support of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Again, McNulty and Pruitt asked "what is this about." Ken's answer generated not only the funding but a 17 year relationship with GM as the exclusive corporate underwriter of Ken's many PBS films and mini-series. "Before the Civil War," the young looking Burns told the grizzled GM veterans, "everyone referred to the United States as plural - 'the United States are'. After the Civil War, it became 'the United States is'. My film is about how 'are' became 'is.'" Pruitt and McNulty agreed to fund the project on the spot.

"Baseball," was the only film project that Ken started believing he knew a great deal about the subject matter, quickly realizing he "knew nothing." As a young child, Ken was a catcher and second baseman on neighborhood teams. It was an escape for him, his only time to take his mind completely off his sick mother and difficulties at home. Baseball provided his "first experience being out in the world alone, which gave me great satisfaction. I still remember being catcher and racing down the line to back up the throw to first base because the first baseman usually missed it. I remember a Derek Jeter-like play I made at second base and the time I was a relief pitcher. The unifying themes of baseball and the country are time, memory, family and home. Baseball is the intersection of fact and metaphor. It is about excellence and individual heroism; about situational response and ties to a community's identity." Ken says his "Baseball" documentary focuses on the Boston Red Sox and the Dodgers because of how they personify the passions the sport fosters. "Baseball is about rooting for the home team. I've been a Red Sox fan since I moved to New England in 1971. I was born in Brooklyn so I grew up liking the Dodgers, but without the hatred when they moved."

Ken not only defined America's passion for baseball in his PBS series, but connected with his two daughters through his love and memories of the sport. A few years ago he took Sarah and Lilly (now 21 and 17) back to the ball fields where he played as a child. "Ask them a time they remember having great fun with their Dad," Ken says, "and they will undoubtedly mention the day I played shadow ball and relived the memories of my greatest baseball moments." Sharing experiences with Sarah and Lilly has been a priority for Ken, who as a single parent made "being Mr. Mom and spending time with them a priority. I feel so blessed that I didn't miss many of the important times. Being a father is my most important occupation." Sarah will graduate this year from Yale and Lilly is in school in Connecticut.

For Ken, the Christmas holidays include going with his family to the Unitarian Church to sing Christmas carols, picking out and decorating a tree together, and quietly celebrating the holiday in Walpole. His new wife, Julie and ex-wife are Jewish, but the holidays, Ken believes, are about family, togetherness, and building memories. He especially adores that both girls "like the same music and movies I like. Their music has an identifiable half-life and ours is still going strong. They steal my James Taylor and Beatles albums and Sarah's boyfriend took her to see Simon & Garfunkel for her birthday."

Sarah may be on a path to follow in Ken's deep footsteps as a documentary filmmaker. She is interested in American history with an emphasis on race relations. Ken's greatest ambition is to produce a film about Martin Luther King. "I've wanted to do it all my life. I'm now hard wired to do it." The King family, Ken says, contacted him two years ago, "but they were not ready to let go enough to give me the freedom I need, and I respectfully declined. Race is the critical fault line of American history. Because of my work with the Civil War, jazz, baseball and other documentaries, the African-American community does not feel I'm heading where I don't belong. Someday I will do the film and I hope Sarah will join me."

Ken's next film set for release on PBS is the history of boxing champion Jack Johnson. "It's as good a film as I have ever made," he claims. Johnson was scorned because he took a public stand on race issues. "I showed it in rough cut to audiences and their jaws dropped. They had no idea." Called "Unforgivable Blackness," the four-hour film includes extensive footage of all Johnson's fights and features music by Wynton Marsalis and voice-over by Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, Billy Bob Thornton and Eli Wallach. James Earl Jones, George Plimpton and several others offer on-camera comments.

After locking "Jack Johnson" in the next few weeks, Ken will move onto full time work on his extensive World War II PBS documentary. Waiting in the wings is a historical film perspective on America's greatest treasure, the National Parks, which he is producing with Dayton Duncan, who also co-produced Ken's most recent PBS film, "Horatio's Drive." He's hoping to do a film on his favorite composer, Duke Ellington, in the future.

With all these projects and passions waiting in a long queue to be memorialized as "A Film by Ken Burns," there are four surprising passions he speaks of even more enthusiastically. The first is his favorite holiday, July 4th, which he spends driving to Saxton's River, VT for the town parade followed by a BBQ chicken picnic and family softball game in Walpole. Second is The New York Times crossword puzzle, which he does in pen daily, completing the Saturday puzzle "in about 30-minutes." Third is "God's work" being done by his wife Julie and Room to Grow. On January 26, the charity will host a fund-raising event at Christies where Ken, Carly Simon, Bob Costas, Wynton Marsalis and others will auction off opportunities to share history with them. For more information Room to Grow can be reached at (212) 620-7800. Finally, "Julie obviously loves children and God willing, I would like to have more children. Between jazz and baseball, there are lots of choices for names. Henry Aaron Burns is a good name." In the spirit of the holidays and giving, Ken agreed that perhaps it would be best if Julie selected the names.

To contact Ken Burns, fax him at 603-756-4389 or e-mail me at jack@jackmyers.com and I will forward all e-mails to him.